Ambivalent Alterities: Pakistani Post-9/11 Fiction in English

Abstract

This book has so far begun tracing an arc from Judith Butler’s US-centric frames of war to a more fluid transnationalism at play in US fiction of the post-2003 invasion of Iraq. In this chapter, I continue the ‘unan-choring’ of the 9/11 novel from the United States by analysing three novels by authors from outside America: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (2007), The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam (2008) and Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie (2009). These novels, as I will show, are not only global, but consciously globalised: working within — while at the same time challenging — a lucrative global market for Anglophone fiction by South Asian authors, they ‘vacillate’ in their attitudes towards global media frames.1

Peter Morey, ‘“The rules of the game have been changed”: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Post-9/11 Fiction’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47.2 (2011), p. 138. See also Derek Gregory’s use of the term, as discussed in Chapter 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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As Edward Said has prominently argued, in the Western news media ‘“Islam” has licensed not only patent inaccuracy but also expressions of unrestrained ethnocentrism, cultural and even racial hatred, deep yet paradoxically free-floating hostility’. Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (London: Vintage, 1997), p. li.Google Scholar

The journalist Ahmed Rashid has noted that ‘[b]y the summer of 2003, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan were becoming deeply frustrated. “Pakistani border troops have been given orders to allow extremists to cross into Afghanistan and then help them return home by giving them covering fire,” a U.S. military officer told me in Bagram. Maj.-Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, warned, “Hot pursuit would probably be my last resort.” [Hamid] Karzai was frustrated with the Americans because no senior U.S. official was criticizing Islamabad for allowing the Taliban to operate out of Pakistan. On a visit to Islamabad in April 2003, Karzai gave [Pervez] Musharraf a list of Taliban commanders allegedly living openly in Quetta. Musharraf was furious and denied there was such a list.’ Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Threat to Global Security (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 229.Google Scholar

Spivak gestures towards something similar in Death of a Discipline: ‘The meaning of the figure is undecidable, and yet we must attempt to dis-figure it, read the logic of the metaphor.’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 71.Google Scholar

In his influential study Islam and Politics, John L. Esposito notes that ‘[f]or both Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, the task of modern Muslims is nothing less than a great jihad against the enemies of Islam to reestablish a true Islamic territory, or rule, which is the prerequisite for following the Islamic way of life. … Any other form of government, whether foreign dominated or under Muslim control, is illegitimate and thus a non-Islamic territory, an object of holy war.’ John L. Esposito, Islam and Politics (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1998), p. 142. Looking specifically at the influence of these thinkers in Southeast Asia, Bilveer Singh argues that ‘Islamists like al-Banna, [Maulana] Maududi and Qutb have, just as in the Middle East, been evoked in Southeast Asia for the reconstruction of Islam to achieve political goals. Using Al-Ikhwan-type ideas, Islamists in Southeast Asia have created a regional political ideal to challenge existing secular orders. … Utilizing the rhetoric of the “rule of God” over the “rule of Man”, these Islamists used Islamic categories to legitimize political violence against any regime.’ Bilveer Singh, The Talibanization of Southeast Asia: Losing the War on Terror to Islamist Extremists (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), p. 19.Google Scholar

See for example Noam Chomsky, ‘Wars of Terror’, in Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire, ed. Carl Boggs (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 131–49.Google Scholar